Flint Public Art Project emulates 'radical gesture' that changed America's most dangerous city

FLINT, MI — There was a moment, "a very specific moment," Stephen
Zacks recalls, when the idea that would put a floating house in downtown Flint,
paint the city's tallest and emptiest building in bright lights and draw
hundreds of people to an abandoned Chevrolet manufacturing site was born.

It was 2010 and Zacks was 650 miles from his hometown of Flint, standing
on a pier overlooking the Hudson River in New York City with a friend, sipping
a beer. The two had been best friends when they were 13 and growing up in
Flint. Recently reconnected, they talked about the city they grew up
in and what they were doing now. Zacks, a writer also involved in the New York
arts and architecture scene, was talking about the latest community art event
he was involved in, a contemporary art
and light festival along the New York waterfront.

And then his friend asked him a question.

"Why don't you do that in Flint?"

For Zacks, it was not so much a question as it was a call to arms.

"Within a day or two of him asking me that question, I wrote a
proposal for the project and started sharing it with my colleagues," he said.
He called friends in Detroit, he called Joel Rash, founder of The Flint Local
432, an all-ages music venue for teens; he called Mayor Dayne Walling.

"What could be helpful?" he said he wanted to know. "What ideas
are out there? What kinds of cultural practice are generative of living in
cities, and what kinds of contemporary art design, urbanism could potentially
have the ability to transform places in Flint?"

It was a question he'd been thinking about for a while, though not
necessarily for Flint. A writer specializing in art, architecture and urbanism, Zacks had a
contract with Inventory Books/Princeton Architectural Press for a book
tentatively titled "A Beautiful Ruin:
The Generation that Transformed New York from 1967-1986."

One chapter is dedicated to Stefan Eins, a native of Austria who
moved to New York in the '60s, and in the late '70s, opened Fashion Moda, a
gallery in the South Bronx now famous for how it brought new as well as accepted forms of art -- and the people who appreciate them -- together. It was where graffiti was first looked at as a true art form, during a time when hip hop was born right in that neighborhood, before the world knew what it was.

Zacks said he continues to
find Eins's work inspirational.

"That was a really radical gesture at that time, to move to what's
considered the most dangerous neighborhood and just open the door," Zacks said.

Interesting choice of words: 25 years after Eins opened his famous gallery, the
Flint Public Art Project is headquartered in Carriage Town -- a neighborhood in
the country's most dangerous city three
years running.

In the past year, Flint Public Art Project has been turning heads with some of its
bigger works. In March, it announced the winners of the Flat
Lot Competition — a contest that brought in more than 200 designs from across
the world to put a temporary artistic pavilion in a downtown parking lot this
summer.

In May, it held the three-day Free City art festival, an effort to
temporarily reclaim the abandoned manufacturing site known as
Chevy in the Hole that drew hundreds of locals and several artists from across
the world.

Their most recent project is a contest at Spring Grove, a nature
area on Second Street near downtown Flint that, in addition to two ponds,
native plant life and a family of ducks, is home to two abandoned silos. The
contest is looking for designs for temporary installations to show how the
silos might be saved and reused.

While a large part of their mission through public art is to show how
abandoned spaces can be reclaimed and reused, the projects themselves are often accompanied by the
word "temporary." It's brought criticism from some — why not do something
permanent? — but Mayor Dayne Walling, like FPAP organizers, doesn't see that as a
problem.

"Urban development in the 21st century is a lot more creative and
place-focused and on a traditional economic development even than 20 or 30
years ago. It's about activating and creating places that business and families
and students want to go," Walling said. "I see the public art displays as
prototypes for projects that can be fully developed and implemented at a later
point.

"I think the Free City event was a great example. It took place over a
few days. The project started and it ended. But the projects that were on
display showed me how we can use the Chevy site in a way that can serve the
community and be done at a reasonable cost."

While it's drawn international artists to the area, FPAP started
with much more humble beginnings.

Zacks started by hosting events during Flint's second Friday Art
Walk events, borrowing equipment from friends to put light projections on
Genesee Towers and playing music for people to dance. The first projector he
borrowed wasn't even powerful enough to be clearly
visible, overpowered by city lights, but when people showed up and started dancing anyway, he said he
thought it was the "coolest thing that happened."

He'd looked for funding in the beginning but his proposals were denied.

"Which
was fine. It was probably a healthy thing to do it with no budget, because
that's how we did everything in New York. You did it because you wanted to, not
because the foundation gave you money to do it. It's because you had the idea and
were compelled by the idea," he said. "People do that in Flint all the time.
But I do think there's a little bit of a sense of a foundation dependency
complex where they're expecting people to pay them to do something."

After a few more events during Art Walk, FPAP received an Art Place grant for $250,000 in 2012, a sum that
allowed Zacks to hire a staff and start holding larger events like Free City
and the Flat Lot competition.

It also allowed them to bring in outside artists,
something that not all local artists are keen to.

"I think that it's great that people need to be coming here and
collaborating, but the feeling is that FPAP is like, 'You guys don't know what
this is.' ... They're trying to change our culture, rather than enhance it," said Emma Davis, the founder of Flint Dance Collaborative who's
been hired to dance with her group for three FPAP events.

In Flint, she added, "I definitely feel like a lot of artists are
self-employed or are grassroots. A lot of people, it's their life. Just because
they're fancy New York artists or live in Europe (it doesn't mean) that they're
any more valuable."

But that's exactly what FPAP's Director of Programs Jerome Chou
and Director of Strategy and Operations James Andrews say they love about being
in Flint.

Both were living and working in Manhattan when they heard about
what Zacks was doing and got involved. Chou laughs at the understatement when
he said he took a significant pay drop to work for FPAP, but he's still living
in Carriage Town and riding his bike all over Flint. At a recent meeting they
all discussed what their personal and professional five-year plan was. Funds
providing, Chou said he plans on sticking around.

"The clincher for me is I came here at the end of August for my
first time. Never been to Flint before, and for a weekend
I just hung out with the people who were working on the project and all the
people Stephen knew from when he was a kid," he said. "It was a very diverse
group of people. I thought, this is not just a standalone project. It has ties
to the city. And that made me feel like we could get something done."

Andrews still keeps a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan he
says he can barely afford, but said he prefers Flint — and it's people — to Manhattan.

"To put it very simply, Flint is a place where you can do art that
will make a difference, that will make a big impact, that will really change
things. If you were doing this in New York," he said, gesturing to an abandoned
gas station he and Chou and some volunteers were painting on Flint's north
side, "people wouldn't think twice about it. They wouldn't look at it, they
wouldn't talk to you about it, it would just be business as usual. ... We've had
30 people come by in the past two hours just to inquire about what we're doing
and ask what's going on. So basically it makes a bigger difference."

Not that everyone is catching on. Even in its early days with weak
projections on Genesee Towers, there were people who didn't like, or just didn't
"get," some of the ideas FPAP was putting out there, Zacks said. (In February FPAP hosted a "What is bad art?" discussion forum.) But he's
continued since then to put on contemporary art festivals -- and, for the most part, continued not to
care what the naysayers say.

"I want to be provocative. I don't want to give people what they expect,
what they think art is. There's a lot of stuff out there, and a lot of it doesn't
come into this area. I wanted to challenge this audience," he said. "We still
want to be challenging, but we still want participation."

Lately Zacks has spent more time in New York as he continues to work on his
book, but speaking on the phone, he doesn't sound so different — Austrian accent
aside — from Stefan Eins, the man who opened his own provocative gallery in what
was America's most dangerous city 35 years ago.

In a phone interview, Eins spoke about his visit to Flint in 2012,
when Zacks brought him out for an exhibition.

"I went there to on the premise that human creativity is a basic
human thing to do and happens anywhere on the global level, including the burned-out areas of the major cities," Eins said.

Scott
Atkinson is an entertainment reporter for the Flint Journal and can be reached
at (810) 262-0216 or at satkins1@mlive.com. You can also follow Scott on Facebook
or Twitter.